Internet search engines to date have not facilitated business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce in the marketplace for products or services where locality is an important consideration. Buyers and vendors currently have no forum to publish their needs and offerings to a community of qualified service providers because present Web directories lack both the comprehensiveness and functionality that is needed to drive business interactions.
In addition, companies that host and manage traditional online business directories—yellow pages and other interactive directories—have marketed themselves as single-point destination sites. This tact, while effective for some applications, is limited in its reach to both buyers and sellers of products and services. Advertising and marketing expenses consume much of their overall budget. They also need to build their own unique brand affiliation without the aide of an established business relationship with its potential customer base. And finally, a single destination point has limited scalability since it can only reach users within the range of its own advertising and marketing campaigns.